The Black Friars

For the first few centuries of the modern era, everybody expected the French Inquisition. Dystopian Catholic France would have it no other way. They scoured Farrellitism into paranoid French undergrounds or Occidental exile; to this day, children are terrorized into good behavior by the simple threat "Gardes ta langue": watch your tongue. When the Nestorian Epistles led to the construction of Saint-Thomas d'Indé in Paris, the Inquisitors fought it tooth and nail, driving several Syro-Indian metrans back to the Malabar Coast before the rest were built and burning one or two Heretical Heroes [who?]. During the Guise Golden Age, any thinker or writer of note expected a visit from inquisitors at some point during their career; the first visit by the Inquisition was a commemorated coming of age, like losing your virginity.

After the War of the French Succession, the Burgundian disengagement from the Catholic Church led to the decline of the Inquisition as an arm of the French state. But given how powerful it had been for those first 200 years, is it any surprise that the fear of the Inquistion has lasted to the present day?

In Andalusada, that fear has a name, a face and a mythos: the Black Friars.

Asad from Seville

Mahdism doesn't just cause wars. As an ethos and a mythos, its (minor) influence has extended to every aspect of Iberian global culture, Christian and Muslim.

Mahdism has shaped the Ibero-Romance languages, giving them metaphors just like Jacobitism gave English sub rosa IRL. It's established an iconography and a lexicon of motifs (the keys on the necklace, hunter green shot through with silver thread) that are recognized worldwide. It's been a recurring inspiration for a pan-Iberian artistic corpus - especially a lyrical corpus: Mahdism has produced marches favored by directors as far south as the CRC, and its melodies have been set to different lyrics and become recognized as far away as Japan.

That said, though, Mahdism's mostly felt through its violence. It's caused three wars in Iberia itself; it's caused no end of troubles in Spanish North Africa, not counting the infamous Chergui; it is the impetus for considerable terrorism, especially that of the G1200.

The most legendary Mahdist terrorism, though, may have been neither Mahdist nor terrorist. We would call it the work of a serial killer, but when he struck there was no word in any language to describe the carnage he left behind.

That terrorism was the work of a single man, Asad from Seville.

(Re)introducing Karl Marx

Myth: Karl Marx was Prussian.
Fact: Karl Marx is most famous for being Prussian, and established his name in public consciousness during the rebellions that rocked the Baltic to its core during the 1830s. The first person to write under the name "Karl Marx," however, was demonstrably Genevan, and may have been writing in other parts of Switzerland anonymously from as early as 1824. By 1841 two other authors had adopted the pseudonym, one Bavarian and one writing in Provence (infamous for his shaky grasp of the German language); these four authors are universally agreed to have formed the core of first-generation Marxian economic writing.

A recurring complaint throughout history

Excerpted from Güntheritism: A Very Poor Introduction:

"The Revel Catechism was the first work widely published in the Livonian language. The Balts were among the last peoples of Europe to embrace the Christian faith, a task that the Knights of the Order had never thought to undertake themselves. This was brought to the Master's attention after he was settled in Riga; claims of the "Livonian Trinity" of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and St. George the Dragonslayer remain hotly contentious to the present day, although it has been immortalized in Baltic profanity...

Introducing Constantine II of Hungary

"King Constantine." You don't need to name him any more than that; everybody will know who he is, just as well as they'd recognize "Count Dracula." And for the same reasons.

The guy is hated across cultures.

Let's introduce him...

Oliver Farrell

Andalusada has its *Luther, in the form of Johan Georg Günther. If only life was that simple. IRL, though, didn't have just one Protestantism: it had at least two.

*Protestantism does best in the liminal spaces of the Holy Roman Empire. The biggest of them is the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, which Günther turns into Prussia in a way that winds up aborting the unification of Germany. But it's not the only liminal space of the HRE; another is the intersection of the Alps where Germany, Italy, and France run into each other. At the time, it was variously Lyons, Provence, Savoy, and the Eidgenossenschaft. We call it "Switzerland."

IRL, the other (and much more dominant) Protestantism was started there by Huldrych Zwingli. (Two of them, actually, because Zwingli also personally spun off the Anabaptists.) Herein, it begins in what I suspect is now part of France. And the guy who begins it is at once legendary, historic, and mythical.

His name is Oliver Farrell.

Introducing Saint Sakura

A classic trope of yuri manga is that (Japan being blissfully ignorant of the ways of Christendom) our lesbian couple usually meets at a Catholic girls' school. This school is traditionally named after Saint Engrish, something feminine-sounding that's not actually from any Indo-European language.

Never is it a Japanese name.

I'm going to stand that on its head. Meet Saint Sakura.